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By admin, August 9, 2010 10:11 am

When last I visited the issue of am I green enough (see my article in my blog),I was reluctant at best to take on the moniker of a green maker, but considered myself at least on the right path. Now the subject has come up yet again.

I was recently approached to join a website selling eco friendly art to the the design trade. So once again I must ask myself if I am worthy to join such a select group? My first thought in responding to the request was to chant my mantra, “I am not your typical green maker who uses groovy bamboo recycled plastic and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified wood in their work. I just make well-crafted work mostly in solid wood from mostly locally sourced materials that hopefully will not end up in a landfill for a couple hundred years.” The response I got back, “ yeah that works for me,” was not what I expected. I expected to be politely declined and to take the easy way out of having to further explore my greenness. Instead, I felt like I had just gained entry into a club in which I did not belong and now had to come up with a new rationale to justify my membership.

So I set out on a quest to make myself greener. My first step was to call my local family run lumber yard, where I buy most of my lumber, and see if I could get that holy grail of greenness - FSC certified wood for future projects. When I spoke with the owner, he replied that because he was not FSC certified he could not sell FSC products and because it cost $3,500 a year to become certified it was unlikely he would be able to do it. That seemed like a lot of money to me as well but I figured as long as I had him on the phone I would ask a few more questions. I was curious if he knew the source of most of his domestic hardwoods, to which he replied all most were from the southeast and mostly came from Appalachian hardwoods or roughly about a 200-mile radius from us. He also went on to say that he had certificates from the U.S Forestry Service certifying most of his hardwoods as sustainable harvested. While not the green seal of approval I sought, that all seemed pretty in line with my own beliefs on green and it would allow me to continue to support a small family run business instead of a large corporation - something also in my belief system.

But I decided to continue my search anyway. I did a google search and called the large local lumber yards. As I had suspected, nobody local stocked FSC products but it could be found within a couple hours drive. The suppliers were almost all the big boys and I would have to pay trucking fees, buy in larger quantities and of course pay more for the materials as well as not being able to hand pick the lumber for color, grain, and the least waste as I usually do.

If there is a moral to this story it is that being green involves tradeoffs. I might like to build my furniture from FSC certified woods, but to do so the wood would have to be trucked in from further away, bought from a large corporate entity and would result ,ironically, in more waste than carefully hand picking what I need from my small time local dealer.

It was a long trip, but I’ve returned to my beginning. Being green is many things. I may not be able to claim the sexy aspects of it but I do my best.

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By admin, July 6, 2010 2:13 pm

My folding console /dinning on view for the past year at the Grovewood Gallery in Asheville NC and written about in previous blog posts has just returned home and is now on sale on my Etsy site , click the link to be taken to the sale page

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By admin, July 2, 2010 9:18 am

When people ask me how I categorize my work or better yet what I call my style of work,I tell them I make functional sculpture. I always avoid the other standard catch phrases like art furniture,contemporary furniture or artiture because functional sculpture best sums up what my work is about. I take a  very personal fine art aesthetic to building functional objects for the everyday. I could probably leave it at that enough said, but as I think about it in more depth there is a history of functional sculpture going back to the earliest objects created by humans.
In museums and academia it is categorized as the decorative arts but essentially as humans built the tools and objects necessary for living they did more than just make a nondescript items. They imbued their objects with meaning along with making a tool whose handle was comfortable to grip or chair comfortable to sit by embellishing them with symbols and shapes of meaning to them and their culture. So I can draw a direct line from my work to that of cave man woodworker, now that is enough said!

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By admin, May 10, 2010 12:24 pm

I am not a woodworker whose work is all about wood though wood is the primary medium in which I work. I would like to think that my designs can stand apart from the materials they are built from and it is seldom that I use flashy figured or exotic woods as the focal point of a piece. I much prefer to use more common woods and color and texture to make my statements and the wood I prefer the most for that task is ash.
Why ash, well for one ash is cheap. Furniture woods go in and out of fashion much like everything else in the world of popular consumption, and as they become popular prices rise. Ash however has never ridden a wave of popularity like oak, walnut, cherry or maple and though it has stayed in common usage mainly as tool handles and baseball bats it’s price has remained stable and relatively inexpensive. This could however change in the near future as an invasive Asian beetle known as the Emerald ash borer has begun destroying many northern states ash forests and may ultimately rival Dutch Elm Disease and Chestnut Blight for it’s path of destruction.  So beyond being cheap what makes Ash so attractive, let me count the ways. Ash has a wonderful color ,a little whiter than oak, that looks great under the low toxicity environmentally friendly lacquer I like to use. It’s distinctive grain again much like oak also looks great when whitewashed or pickled like in my piece “Back in the Saddle Again” or bleached like the seat on the piece pictured ” A place to Hang My Hat” or painted with milk paint as the back elements are on that piece as well.It also works exceptional well for an ebonized or black finishes and other dyed or stained finishes as the wood accepts stains and dyes very readily not blotchy and uneven as many woods  tend to.  Ash also does not tend to splinter and blow out when being shaped and though it is not the easiest wood to carve it holds a nice crisp line. So here is to you ash a fine wood indeed.
As a footnote, I recently bought an ash log from a local tree service and had it sawed into 2 1/2” thick slabs and have it drying outside my shop which should take about 2 years.I have no plans as of yet for the wood but I do have a couple of years to think about it

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By admin, May 3, 2010 2:49 pm

I have put some new work up for sale on my Etsy site, including the console table pictured  “Up a Creek Redux “. This table was originally designed for and sold exclusively through Guild.com’s Artful home catalog but since I am no longer selling through the Artful home I am now offering it on my own. I have also once again dropped prices from 75$ to 200$ on other pieces so please take advantage of the spring sale.

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By admin,

Schiffer Publishing has included images of my work in another of their fine books ,to come out in the next few weeks, “Wood Art Today 2″ a survey of current trends in woodworking. Last year they included me in their book Studio Furniture Today’s Leading Woodworkers.Here is a link to Schiffer Publishing

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By admin, April 30, 2010 3:40 pm

Just a quick update on the hacking of my website. At this point I have replaced all the images that were deleted from my website gallery by the hacker. I have yet to replace all the information on the size and materials and other information about each individual piece, the task just seems to daunting for the moment ,but if you want specific information on a piece you see on my website please feel free to contact me.

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By admin, April 14, 2010 1:59 pm

I would like to thank one of my readers who pointed out to me this week that the gallery section of my website ,www.erikwolken.com, had been maliciously hacked. Someone with obviously nothing better to do hacked into my web site and deleted all the images and text in the gallery section and so for the moment that section of the site remains empty until I can rebuild it. Needless to say it was a stupid act of vandalism and will be a pain in the ass to repair but hopefully I will get the gallery section of the website up and going in the next week. If you would like to see images of my work you can still visit my site on Custom Made or view work for sale on my Etsy site

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By admin, April 6, 2010 1:47 pm

I belong to a loose collective of woodworkers called “White Cross Woodworkers”(WCW) that has shared  shop space for the last ten years . Together we work in a10,000 sq/ft building and collectively own most of the large machinery while each of us maintains there own bench space. This past fall we made the decision to showcase all of our talents by creating a gallery ,open to the public, in the shop and now after month’s of toil The Gallery at WCW is open. If you are in the Chapel Hill North Carolina area please stop by at 3315 NC 54 West and view  the many talents that WCW represents.

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By admin,

In my bio I have a line that says “I am  inspired by the world around me” but besides being a glib line what does that really mean. What is my process  to come up with my next idea or solution (design) for a client.The sources of my inspiration seems a topic for some self reflection and more than a brief article but here is an attempt.
Most of my ideas come from my sketch book ,and I keep them going back more than 20 years ,as I see things that interest me in both the natural world and the man made world I scribble them down. My scribbles though are often transformed into functional objects, if I see an architectural detail I like I might put it down as a detail in a table construction or a chair, so often I do not know  the source of the original object. I also have another habit with my sketch books which is to create design problems and then sometimes spend years working out solutions. My “Little Big Man” series which I wrote about in the blog is a good example of a design problem  I set up for myself in coming up with ideas for multifunction furniture. I have had one ongoing design problem  running through many sketch books to design a simple yet elegant 36” diameter kitchen table that sells for under 1500$.I have called this my Noguchi problem or my search for  my own Noguchi after Isamu Noghuchi’s brilliant yet simple 3 piece 1944 coffee table. I also just aimlessly doodle in my sketch books with no apparent object in mind and this sometimes is how  I have come up with my most sculptural ideas. My Torso series came about that way as I identified some errant doodles as looking like human torso’s and devoted a few  pages to developing the idea. At some later point in time when needing an idea for a gallery show  I was in I went back to those drawings and developed them as cabinets.
Going to my sketch books is always a good first step for me but just as often I like to do some research around an idea and find sources outside my own head. At that point I start to look through my own design library of both furniture and architecture and look not only for other peoples specific design ideas but look for interesting details I can take out of context and use in other ways. I once found an image of a lid for turned vessel and used it as an idea for a table base. I also, like most scour the internet for cool ideas and images as sources of inspiration. Finally my last act is to take a walk not necessarily a walk in nature or a walk looking for inspiration but a walk to clear my thoughts and make me more receptive to the ideas rolling around in my head. Motion, just the act of moving forward has always been a way for me creatively problem solve or just clear the slate and let the ideas flow.